Blind Man With a Pistol (5 page)

     
A last brief flicker of comprehension showed in the white man's eyes. For an infinitesimal instant the pupils contracted slightly. The man was making a tremendous effort to speak. The strain was visible in a slight tightening of the muscles of the face and neck.

     
"Who did it? Quick! A name!" Grave Digger hammered, his black face bloody and contorted.

     
The white man's tightly clamped lips trembled and suddenly opened, like a seldom used door. A liquid, gurgling sound came out, followed instantly by a gush of blood in which he drowned.

     
"'_Jesus_,' "Grave Digger echoed as he slowly straightened his bent figure. "'_Jesus bastard!_' What a thing to say."

     
Coffin Ed's face was like a thundercloud. "Jesus, Digger, Goddammit!" he flared. "What you want him to say, Jesus hallelujah? The mother-raper got his throat cut for a black whore--"

     
"How you know it was a black whore who did it?"

     
"By whoever!"

     
"All right, let's call the precinct," Grave Digger said thoughtfully, playing his flashlight over the dead man's body. "Male, fair hair -- blue eyes; jugular vein cut, dead on 123rd Street --" Glancing at his watch. "3.11 a.m.," he recited.

     
Coffin Ed had hurried back to the car to get the precinct station on the radio. "Without his pants," he added.

     
"Later."

     
While Coffin Ed was transmitting the essential facts over the radio-phone, colored people in various stages of undress began emerging from the black dark tenements alongside. Black women in terrycloth robes with their faces greased and their straightened hair done in small tight plaits like Topsy; brownskinned women with voluptuous breasts and broad buttocks wrapped in bright-coloured nylon, half-straight hair hanging loosely about their cushion-mouthed sleepy-eyed faces; high yellows in their silks and curlers. And the men, old, young, nappy-headed, conk-haired, eyes full of sleep, faces lined where witches were riding them, mouths slack, wrapped in sheets, blankets, raincoats, or just soiled and wrinkled pajamas. Collecting in the Street to see the dead man. Looking inexpressibly stupid in their morbid curiosity. A dead man was always good to see. It was reassuring to see somebody else dead. Generally the dead men were also colored. A white dead man was really something. Worth getting up anytime of night. But no one asked who cut him. Nor why. Who was going to ask who cut a white man's throat in Harlem? Or why? Just look at him, baby. And feel good it ain't you. Look at that white mother-raper with his throat cut. You know what he was after....

     
Coffin Ed gave Lieutenant Anderson a brief description of the dead body and a more detailed description of the black man in the red fez they had first seen running down the street with the pants over his arm.

     
"Do you think the murdered man had some extra pants?" Anderson asked.

     
"He didn't have _any_ pants."

     
"What the hell!" Anderson exclaimed. "What the hell's wrong with you? What are you holding back? Let's have it all."

     
"The man didn't have any pants or underpants."

     
"Mmmm. All right, Johnson, you and Jones stay put. I'll call homicide, the District Attorney and the Medical Examiner and have them send their men, and I'll put out a pickup for the suspect. You think I should seal up the block?"

     
"What for? If the suspect did it, he'll be to hell and gone by the time you get the block sealed off. And if anybody else did it they were already gone. All you can do is take in a couple loads of these citizens for questioning if we can determine exactly where it was done."

     
"All right, in time. Right now you and Jones stay with the body and see what you can learn."

     
"What'd the boss say?" Grave Digger asked when Coffin Ed rejoined him beside the body on the sidewalk.

     
"Just the usual. The experts are coming. We're to dig what we can without leaving our friend."

     
Grave Digger turned towards the silent crowd collecting in the shadows. "Any of you know anything that might help?"

     
"H. Exodus Clay is the name of an undertaker," a brother said.

     
"Does this look like a time for that?"

     
"To me it does. When a man's dead you got to bury him."

     
"I mean anything that might help find out who killed him," Grave Digger said to the others.

     
"I seen a white man and a colored man whispering."

     
"Where was that, lady?"

     
"Eighth Avenue at 15th Street."

     
People in Harlem always drop the "one hundred" from the designation of their streets, so that 10th Street is 110th, 15th is 115th and 25th is 125th. That wasn't very near but it was close enough.

     
"When, lady?"

     
"I don't remembers 'zactly. Night 'fore last, I thinks."

     
"All right, forget it. You folks go to bed."

     
A little shuffling followed but no one left.

     
"Shit!" someone exclaimed.

     
"Those car cops must be sleeping," Coffin Ed said impatiently.

     
Grave Digger began a cursory examination of the body. There was a cut across the back of the left hand and a deep cut in the palm of the right hand between the index finger and thumb. "He tried to ward off the knife first, then he grabbed the blade. He wasn't very scared."

     
"How you make that?"

     
"Hell, if he'd been trying to run, ducking and dodging, he'd been cut on the arms and back if his throat hadn't been cut to start with, as you can see it hadn't."

     
"All right, Sherlock Jones. Then tell me this much. How come his privates ain't been touched? If this was a sex fight that's the first thing they go for."

     
"How we know it was a sex fight? It was probably plain robbery."

     
"Well, buddy-o, you can't overlook the fact the man ain't got no pants."

     
"Yeah, there's that, and this is Harlem, if you want to add it up that way," Grave Digger said. "I just wish these mother-rapers wouldn't come up here and get themselves killed, for whatever reason."

     
"Iss bad enough killing our own," a voice said from the dark. It was followed by a sudden indistinct babble as though the spectators were arguing the point.

     
Coffin Ed turned on them and shouted suddenly, "You people better get the hell away from here before the white cops come in, or they'll run all your asses in."

     
There was a sound of nervous movement, like frightened cattle in the dark, then a voice said belligerently, "Run whose ass in? I lives here!"

     
"All right," Coffin Ed said resignedly. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

     
Grave Digger was staring at the stretch of sidewalk where the body lay in a widening pool of blood. The headlights of their car starkly lighted the stretch down past the Street lamp and the front steps of a number of crumbling houses on that side of the street that had been private residences of a sort a half-century previous. The people who had collected stood along the other side of the street and in back of their car so their dark faces were in the shadow but a row of rusty bare legs and splayed black feet with enormous toes were visible. A Harlem sidewalk, he thought, black feet and purple blood, and a man lying dead. This time he happened to be white. Most times he was black like the legs and feet of the people who stared at him. How many people had he seen lying dead in the street? He couldn't remember, only that most of them had been black. Lying dead and without dignity on the dirty sidewalks. Lying in the coins of dried spit, sticky ice cream and candy wrappers, wads of chewed gum, stained cigarette butts, newspaper scraps, small bones from cooked meat, dog shit, urine stinks, beer bottles, hair-grease tins; stinking, gritty dirt blowing over them by every puff of wind.

     
"Anyway, no used condoms," Coffin Ed said. "They don't like it if there ain't no risk."

     
"Damn right," Grave Digger agreed. "All you got to do is look around and see how many times they've lost."

     
The first of the sirens sounded.

     
"Here they are," Coffin Ed said.

     
The spectators moved back.

     
                 
_______________

Interlude

     
"Like him?" Doctor Mubuta asked.

     
"He's beautiful," the white woman said.

     
"Wrap him up and take him with you," Doctor Mubuta said, coming as near to leering as he had ever done.

     
She blushed furiously.

     
Doctor Mubuta motioned to the cretin, who had no compunction about wrap ping up the sleeping beauty in the bed sheet.

     
"Take him out and put him into the back of her car," Doctor Mubuta directed. Then, turning to the blushing, speechless Mrs Dawson, he said, "He is now your responsibility, Madame. And I trust that as soon as you have thoroughly investigated this miracle and convinced yourself of its authenticity, you will remit the balance of payment."

     
She nodded quickly and left. They all watched her leave. No one said anything. No one on the street gave a second look at the black harelip ped cretin placing a sheet-wrapped figure into the back compartment of an air-conditioned Cadillac limousine. It was Harlem, where anything might happen.

                       
_______________

5

     
"You've been trying to outsmart the white folks, and you found that didn't do no good cause they're smarter than you are," Doctor Mubuta was saying in his singsong voice, his heavy jaw moving with the lecherous twist of a big black whore shaking her butt. His voice was as solemn as his expression and his eyes were as humprless as those of a religious fanatic.

     
"Yeh!" The obscene twist of his jaw was caught, like one buttock aslant, then it resumed its suggestive grind: "And you've been trying to out-lie the white folk, only to discover it was the white folks who invented lying."

     
The teen-aged white girl broke out of her hypnotic trance and giggled like she'd been caught out.

     
Everyone else was staring at him with open mouths as though he were exposing himself.

     
"Yeh! And you've been trying to out-Tom the white folks, and you're surprised to find the white folks is stealing your talent, like they has stole everything you has invented."

     
Mister Sam's old rheumy eyes opened at that and he peeped at Doctor Mubuta. But he shut them immediately as though he didn't want to see what he saw. Dick's head moved slightly and an expression of pained cynicism flickered across his face. A subtle smile tugged at the corners of Anny's mouth. Intolerable outrage took hold of Viola's expression. Sugartit's stretched black eyes remained unchanged as though she weren't tuned in. Van Raff seemed to be smoldering at the incredible theft. The teen-aged white girl giggled again and tried to catch Doctor Mubuta's eye. Suddenly he looked directly at her; his vision lost its vague sightless scope and focused on her, his bright red eyes stripping off her clothes and looking directly between her thighs.

     
"Yeh!" He might have said, "Yeh, man!"

     
The ejaculation made her start guiltily. She closed her legs and blushed.

     
Mister Sam seemed to be sleeping, or else dead.

     
Then they were all listening again, like passengers in a runaway bus, not knowing where they were going but expecting momentarily to run off the edge of the earth.

     
Doctor Mubuta's expression went vacant again as though he had made his point, whatever it was.

     
"Yeh! You've been trying to out-yes white folks, but the white folks is yessing you so fast nowadays you don't know who's yessing who."

     
"Shit!" Until then the speaker had been so inconspicuous he had passed for a gray shadow in the brightly lighted room.

     
The word was heard distinctly but not one hypnotized gaze switched from Doctor Mubuta's belly-dancing under-jaw.

     
"Hear those shots?" asked Doctor Mubuta, ignoring the ejaculation.

     
The question was theoretical. They had been hearing the sound of sporadic shooting for some time and they all knew black youths were rioting on Seventh Avenue. It required no answer.

     
"Throwing rocks at the police," Doctor Mubuta said in his same singsong voice. "Must think those white police is made of window glass."

     
He paused for a moment as though inviting comment. But no one had anything to say; no one knew where it was leading to; they all knew white police were not made of window glass.

     
"I have the one and only solution for the Negro Problem," Doctor Mubuta exclaimed, his heavy black belly-bumping jaw suddenly throwing itto the wind.

     
That was the one for someone to challenge him, but no one did.

     
"We're gonna outlive the white folks. While they has been concentrating on ways of death, I has been concentrating on how to extend life. While they'll be dying, we'll be living forever, and Mister Sam here, the oldest of us all, will be alive to see the day when the black man is the majority on this earth, and the white man his slave."